A History of Ireland in 100 Objects

by Fintan O'Toole

  Many Protestants—among them Douglas Hyde, George Russell and the Abbey writers—were key figures in the cultural revival, but it was difficult to escape the identification of ‘Irish Ireland’ with ‘Catholic Ireland’. Hyde’s insistence that the Gaelic League should avoid politics led to his resignation as its president in 1915. With nationalism becoming such a powerful force in modern Europe, and looking to culture to support its claims, avoiding politics was perhaps an impossible aspiration.

  88. Reclining Buddha, late-nineteenth century

  This seraphically beautiful Buddha, now in the National Museum in Dublin, is a piece of imperial loot. In the Mandalay style, which dates it to 1857–86, the statue is of marble, with the drapery painted gold. It represents the dying but beatific Buddha, preparing for his death and ascent into Nirvana. Colonel Sir Charles Fitzgerald, an Irishman in the British army in India, stole it while on a punitive military expedition to Burma in 1885–6. In 1891, Fitzgerald sent it, along with other looted Burmese statues, to the National Museum.

  Audrey Whitty identified the statue as the one which is mentioned twice in perhaps the most important Irish work of literature of the twentieth century, James Joyce’s Ulysses (set in 1904 and published in 1922). The novel’s hero Leopold Bloom thinks of ‘Buddha their God lying on his side in the museum, Taking it easy with his hand under his cheek’. Later, Bloom’s wife Molly recalls him:

  Breathing with his hand on his nose like that Indian god he took me to show one wet Sunday in the museum in Kildare Street all yellow in a pinafore, lying on his side on his hand with his ten toes sticking out.

  Other imperial objects ended up in Ireland. In 1904 the museum purchased for £100, 41 metalwork objects from Lhasa, brought back from the British invasion of Tibet. (The Treaty of Lhasa, opening up Tibet to British trade, was drawn up by an Irishman, Captain Frederick O’Connor, the leading linguist on the Francis Younghusband expedition to Tibet, 1903–04.) They are reminders that Ireland was not only a victim of British imperialism. Very large numbers of Irish people participated in the expansion and maintenance of the empire, most as foot soldiers, but many as high-ranking military and civil administrators, missionaries, doctors and other professionals.

  In one of the great literary expressions of the imperial spirit, Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, the wild-child hero explains that his name is Kim Rishtike. What, he is asked, is Rishti? ‘Eye-rishti—that was the regiment—my father’s’. ‘Irish, oh I see’. The ‘rishti’ were indeed common enough to get their own word in the Hindi language. Key figures in the extension and maintenance of British rule in India included Laurence Sullivan from Cork, George Macartney from Antrim (who was also the British envoy who tried, and failed, to open up imperial trade with China), John Nicholson from Dublin, and Sir Michael O’Dwyer, from a Catholic family in Tipperary, who led the suppression of protest in the Punjab between 1913 and 1920. O’Dwyer’s religion was not typical but neither was it entirely unusual: by the late-nineteenth century, 30 per cent of Irish recruits to the Indian civil service were Catholic.

  Irish involvement in the empire reached its height with the Boer War in South Africa between 1899 and 1902. A few hundred Irish nationalists fought for the Boers, and leading militants at home—including W.B. Yeats, Maud Gonne, James Connolly and Arthur Griffith—campaigned in their favour. Nevertheless, 28,000 Irishmen fought for the British in South Africa. Anti-imperialism was becoming more vigorous, but it was still a minority position.

  89. Titanic launch ticket, 1911

  Shortly after noon on 31 May 1911, a huge crowd gathered at the Harland and Wolff (H&W) shipyard at Queen’s Island in Belfast Lough for the launch of the great transatlantic liner, Titanic. Among them were many of the workers who had built her. This admission ticket belonged to David Moneypenny, a ship’s painter who worked on the first-class quarters. For him, for his colleagues, for Belfast and for Protestant Ulster, this was a moment of extraordinary accomplishment. Titanic was at the leading edge of twentieth-century technology.

  That such a world-beating ship was created in an Irish city was astonishing, but then Belfast was a new kind of Irish place. It had grown at a phenomenal rate, surging past Dublin in 1891 to become Ireland’s largest city, and growing by another 35 per cent over the rest of that decade.

  Titanic was built on an existing foundation of industrial and technological superlatives: in 1899 H&W had launched the world’s largest ship, the Oceanic. Belfast also had, as Jonathan Bardon notes, the world’s ‘largest rope works, tobacco factory, linen spinning mill, tea machinery works, dry dock and aerated water factory’. There was no chance that southern Ireland, lacking this kind of globally significant industry, could have produced Titanic—it belonged to an imperial and industrial world. Its creators were largely Protestant—2000 Catholics worked in the shipyard but they were not part of its official story: the ship was universally hailed as a ‘great Anglo-Saxon triumph’.

  With the industrial north-east so deeply integrated into an imperial economy, it was never likely that the idea of a Home Rule Ireland, dominated by agricultural interests and heavily influenced by the Catholic church, would be easily sold to the Protestants who built Titanic. Indeed, Titanic herself came to be represented in popular culture through two quite different versions of Ireland. One was the steerage-class emigrants among the 1500 who drowned on the early morning of 15 April 1912 when the great ship sank on her maiden voyage. The other was an Ulster Protestant identity, in which that tragedy seemed to foretell a wider doom, an almost apocalyptic sense of threat. Three days after Titanic sank, the third Home Rule Bill was introduced into the House of Commons in London. Three months later, vicious and organised assaults forced all Catholics out of the shipyards.

  On 28 September, 237,000 men and 234,000 women, from all classes of Protestant Ireland, signed the Ulster Covenant or an associated declaration, committing the men to ‘using all means which may be found necessary to defeat the present conspiracy to set up a Home Rule Parliament in Ireland’. In January 1913, the Ulster Unionist Council, under Dublin-born Edward Carson, decided to organise 100,000 signatories of the covenant into an Ulster Volunteer Force and to train them in the use of firearms. These events created two paradoxes: a violent loyalist rebellion against the state to which it pledged its allegiance, and an Irish nationalism appealing to the idea of a unified nation whose existence was anything but obvious.

  90. Lamp from River Clyde, 1915

  This lamp is from a converted collier, the River Clyde. On 25 April 1915 it lit the way to hell for 2000 soldiers, mostly members of the Munster and Dublin Fusiliers. They had been chosen as the shock troops of an Allied landing near Sedd-el-Bahr at Cape Helles, on the southern tip of the Gallipoli peninsula in Turkey. The Gallipoli operation was intended to break the military stalemate on the western front that had developed since the outbreak of the First World War—the monumental clash of great European empires that began in August 1914 and quickly earned its name as the Great War.

  The River Clyde was deliberately run aground beneath an old fortress, while most of the Dubliners tried to get ashore in open boats. Both regiments made perfect targets for the Turkish gunners in the fort. One officer recalled that the men on the open boats were ‘literally slaughtered like rats in a trap’. Another recalled that the landing as he experienced it:

  was pure butchery and we were at the receiving end. They called it a ‘landing’ but it was hardly even that at the beginning. The dear men were just mown down in scores into a bloody silence as they showed themselves at the Clyde’s open hatches.

  The Dublins had 25 officers and 987 other ranks but only one officer and 374 others made it ashore, many of them wounded. Among the Munsters, about 600 were killed or wounded. The scale of the casualties was such that the batallions were temporarily amalgamated into a single unit, known as the Dubsters.

  It would have been hard to remember, at that point, that the outbreak of the war was greeted by many in Ireland with some relief. Ireland ha
d been on the brink of civil war over Home Rule, but the infinitely larger conflict superseded this insular row. Although Home Rule was finally passed in September 1914, its implementation was immediately postponed for the duration of the war. The Nationalist leader John Redmond supported the war effort. Over 200,000 Irishmen fought in the war. Optimists dared to hope that the experience of fighting side-by-side in a relatively short and triumphant campaign would create a new sympathy between Ulster Protestants and southern Catholics.

  Optimism, not just for Ireland but for humanity, was bled dry on the beaches of Gallipoli and in the mud of France and Belgium. On 1 July 1916, the 36th (Ulster) Division was in the forefront of the offensive on the Somme, suffering 5500 casualties, including 2000 dead—a catastrophe seared into the collective consciousness of Protestant Ulster. The 16th (Irish) Division lost 4330 men (1200 dead) in the same battle in September. At Messines Ridge in June 1917 the two divisions went into battle together—among the dead was Redmond’s brother Willie. In all, at least 35,000 Irishmen died. The war did form a common experience for Irishmen of different traditions, but it was the experience of a scarcely imaginable cataclysm.

  91. James Connolly’s shirt, 1916

  This undershirt was worn by James Connolly in the General Post Office in Dublin during Easter Week 1916. The blood is from a flesh wound on his upper arm; he was far more severely wounded in the leg and had to be strapped to a chair at his execution by firing squad for his role in the abortive Rising. Connolly, born in Edinburgh of Irish parents, was a key figure in the ferment of radical agitation that preceded the rebellion. He was an organiser for the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union (ITGWU) and helped found the Labour Party in 1912. He was imprisoned during the Lockout in 1913, when Dublin’s employers shut out workers who would not give up membership of the ITGWU.

  Able and charismatic as he was, Connolly might have remained a marginal figure. The Irish parliamentary party, reunited under John Redmond, remained the dominant force in nationalist politics. The Great War, however, changed everything. Redmond’s support for the war left a space for revolutionary nationalism to occupy. A small breakaway group from the Irish Volunteers came under the control of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, which secretly planned a rising for which it hoped to have German support. Connolly, with his tiny Citizen Army, did likewise. In the event just 1200 rebels, with no effective German aid, occupied public buildings in Dublin for six days in April 1916.

  The main casualties were civilians, 230 were killed, compared with 132 soldiers or policemen and 64 rebels. Yet the official response to the insurrection—execution of fifteen rebel leaders and mass arrests of nationalists—helped turn the dead rebels into martyrs. In the 1918 general election Redmond faced a resurgent Sinn Féin, a reconstitution of a small, non-violent nationalist party that had been mistakenly blamed for the Rising. Sinn Féin took less than half the vote but won 73 of the 105 Irish seats at parliament. Its MPs then seceded from Westminster and established the first Dáil, which met in Dublin in January 1919, declaring an independent Irish republic.

  The Dáil, however, was increasingly pushed aside by what was by then known as the Irish Republican Army, which later that month shot dead two policemen in Tipperary. The conflict that began with these shootings continued, with the IRA using guerrilla tactics and the London government sending in irregular units—the Black and Tans and Auxiliaries, whose often atrocious behaviour further alienated much of the population—until a truce was declared in July 1921. In the meantime, the Government of Ireland Act of 1920 had established a six-county Northern Ireland. A treaty signed on 21 December 1921 established the twenty-six county Free State as a self-governing entity within the British Commonwealth.

  The treaty was supported by Michael Collins and Arthur Griffith but opposed by Éamon de Valera; it was ratified by the Dáil in January 1922 by 64 votes to 57. The defeated minority revolted, leading to a short but bloody Civil War. It was not the birth that Connolly and his comrades had imagined for an Irish state, but most of Ireland did, at last, have an independent government.

  92. Rejected coin design, 1927

  In January 1926 Minister for Finance Ernest Blythe told the Dáil that the new Irish Free State should have ‘a coinage distinctively our own, bearing the devices of this country’. A committee, chaired by the poet and senator W.B. Yeats, was asked to adjudicate on the best designs submitted. One was by sculptor Jerome Connor. Born in Annascaul, Co. Kerry, he emigrated to Massachusetts when he was fourteen and eventually established his own studio in Washington, DC. He moved back to Ireland in 1925 to work on a memorial to those who lost their lives in the sinking of the Lusitania off the Cork coast in 1915.

  This is Connor’s 1927 proposal for the penny coin. He thought of the penny as a child’s coin and conceived a design that celebrated childhood—the scampish boy is based on his own grand-nephew John.

  It was, on the face of it, an image appropriate to the new state’s aspirations. The Democratic Programme adopted by the first Dáil in 1919 had set itself a very high aim:

  It shall be the first duty of the Govern­ment of the Republic to make provision for the physical,mental and spiritual well-being of the children, to secure that no child shall suffer hunger or cold from lack of food, clothing, or shelter.

  Many children in the new Ireland did enjoy a safe and happy upbringing, but the aspiration to ensure that no child went hungry or cold was certainly not met. Moreover, children were among the worst victims of the dark side of the new state: its elaborate system of social repression through which ‘problem’ citizens were incarcerated in harsh, sometimes dangerous institutions.

  Between the 1920s and the 1950s, more than one per cent of the population was locked up in a mental hospital, a Magdalene laundry, where women thought to be at risk of sexual immorality were made to work without pay, or an industrial school. To these latter institutions, run by religious orders, one child in every hundred was sent. Between 1936 and 1970 approximately 170,000 children entered the gates of one or other of the 50 or so industrial schools, staying on average for seven years. The great majority were committed, not because they were guilty of any offence, but because their families were deemed to be ‘needy’.

  A commission of inquiry established in 2000 found that severe beatings were pervasive in both boys’ and girls’ schools and that, in the institutions for boys, sexual abuse was ‘endemic’. The commission also found that such abuse was allowed to continue because of a general ‘culture of silence’ and because of the ‘deferential and submissive attitude’ of the state authorities towards the religious congregations.

  This was the cruel side of what many in the new state would have regarded as its greatest virtues—its strong emphasis on sexual morality and social control and reverence for religious institutions. For some, those virtues were a source of great pride. For others, they were the excuse for a systematic abuse of power over society’s most vulnerable member

  93. Boyne Coracle, 1928

  When people first came to Ireland around 10,000 years ago, almost certainly they were familiar with skin boat technology. There are images of coracles (or curachs as they have long been known in Ireland) on stone panels at Nineveh in Iraq from around 700 BC. Mediaeval Irish sources describe St Colmcille going into exile and St Brendan going on a fabulous sea voyage in similar hide-clad boats.

  When Michael O’Brien made coracles for salmon fishing on the River Boyne at Oldbridge, Co. Meath in 1928, he was therefore carrying on an immemorial tradition. Its basket-like wooden structure, tightly sealed in leather, harks all the way back to the island’s first inhabitants. The Boyne coracles were oval shaped, generally made from woven hazel rods and covered with locally tanned cow-hides; the size varied from six feet by four feet to six-and-a-half feet by four feet, so that the vessels could easily be covered using a single, large hide.

  Ireland had been, over the previous century, a place of traumatic upheaval: land wars, famine, mass emigration, the em
ergence of industrial Ulster, the shift from Irish to English as the vernacular language. Yet it also retained elements of an extraordinary continuity. The new Irish state tended to exaggerate that continuity, romanticising life in isolated communities, especially on the Aran and Blasket islands off the west coast, as the essential repository of authentic Irishness. The subtle and complex accounts of their own lives given by islanders like Peig Sayers and Tomás Ó Criomhthain were pasteurised into official texts for the state’s main cultural project: the revival of the Irish language as the national vernacular. Robert Flaherty’s 1934 film, Man of Aran, added a layer of timeless myth—not least to the curach itself, which featured centrally in its dramatic scenes of islanders battling against the sea.